Announcing “Road Not Taken”

Road Not Taken is an original puzzle game about life and loss that is currently being developed by Spry Fox! Adventure through a vast, ever-changing forest in the aftermath of a brutal winter storm. Will you find your way?

Progress is coming along nicely and we are aiming to release Road Not Taken before the end of the year. But we’re getting excited now and wanted to share a few tidbits of what’s to come! 🙂 Apologies for being a bit of a tease.

This game grew out of a variety of influences. We borrowed the name and theme from Robert Frost’s 1916 poem “The Road Not Taken“. The mechanics are reminiscent of an evergreen roguelike and should provide hundreds of hours of original gameplay. The art, created by the amazingly talented Brent “Meowza” Kobayashi (previously the Art Director for the Glitch MMO) blends the puzzle rooms of Zelda with his own very personal storybook illustrations.

For Daniel, the designer on the project, (and previously designer of Triple Town, Panda Poet, Leap Day and co-designer of Steambirds and Realm of the Mad God) this is one of the more personal games he has created. When you grow up, you are often told that there is a singular path through life; you go to school, you get a job, you fall in love and then you start a family. What happens when someone wanders far off that path? There’s no single answer to that question, but this game is an exploration of at least one answer. It’s also an experiment with a more pointillist approach to narrative, which we think is particularly well-served by the roguelike genre. Each object, each animation, and each bit of text is a bit of paint on the canvas. Over dozens of playthroughs, a greater theme will be revealed to players.

Over the next couple months, we’ll share more progress on the game. If you’d like to be kept in touch, please sign up for the Spry Fox newsletter, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.